Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Teleportation

One of them is to randomly Google a phrase or concept that
deals with “this kind of thing.” Today,
I did just that with “teleportation.”

We’re all familiar with it, even if it’s through the
consumption of fiction. You’re standing
in one place and then via sophisticated technological conveyance, you suddenly
appear in another part of the globe.
How likely is that ever to be a reality? Utterly improbable as the science goes, it would seem.

Or is it? A search
revealed this link from a news source that I typically avoid altogether. It states that last year, Science magazine
named teleportation the “biggest breakthrough of 2010.” Quantum physicists at the University of
California at Santa Barbara performed an experiment based on the theory that
any object that exists in the universe also exists simultaneously in a parallel
universe. These researchers developed a
device, “a tiny metal paddle just barely visible to the naked eye,” and then
cooled it into a “ground state,” the lowest state of energy allowable according
to quantum mechanics. They then
produced a vibration in the object to the point where it vibrated both a minor
amount and a considerable amount all at the same time. In other words, it existed in two states at
once. Thus, teleportation is found to
be theoretically possible.

How, you might ask?
It’s quantum mechanics. I have
about as much understanding of that as I do string theory…which is to say I’m
murky with it at best. This U of C
experiment was not, however, the end of work with teleportation.

Last April, researchers at the University of Tokyo were able
to teleport light waves from one location to another. Or rather, caused the waves to exist in two separate locations. Granted, light is not matter (or is it? Whole ‘nother can of
tuna) and the breaking down and reassembling of light is a far less complicated
process than it would be for an object.
This is not to knock the success of the teleportation experiment. Doing it with light is quite an
achievement. The transference of such
data on a quantum level has massive implications for computers. “Quantum computers,” if developed, would be
able to operate on quantum mechanical algorithms, allowing for insanely fast
computations. It would mean a whole new
world of data usage.

Which is not to say we would be “beaming” ourselves or
anything else to other locations any time soon. I am actually ok with that fact.
As much a futurist as I am and as nice as it would be to travel anywhere
instantaneously, I am not keen on the idea of something “scrambling my
molecules.” That is as someone else
once put it.

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About Me

I'm a writer, scholar, and researcher in the Chicago area. I have an M.A. in Writing from DePaul University. What do I write? Science fiction mostly. What do I research? Rhetoric and composition theory, all things Fortean...as well as other unpopular things.
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